Manchester United

Manchester United Football Club, known as Manchester United or simply United, is an English professional football club from the city of Manchester, England, which competes in the Premier League. It has played its home matches at Old Trafford since 1910.

It was founded on 17 January 1878 under the name Newton Heath LYR Football Club and joined the First Division in 1892. After being close to bankruptcy in 1902, J. H. Davies took the reins of the club and changed its name to the current one. During the Second World War its stadium was bombed and for a time they played at Maine Road. The team enjoyed unprecedented success after appointing Matt Busby as manager and winning the league in 1956 and 1957. Although the Munich air disaster occurred in 1958, in which eight of the team's players lost their lives along with the coach Tom Curry, the squad pulled through, with Bobby Charlton as a survivor and other greats such as Denis Law and George Best, known as the "holy trinity", during their time as Manchester United players, winning the Champions League in 1968 against Benfica. Between 1990 and 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson led the team to eight league championships and in 1999 it became the first English team to win the Champions League, the Premier League and the FA Cup in the same season, the club's "treble".

At the national level, Manchester United has won a record 20 league titles, 13 FA Cups, 6 League Cups and 21 Community Shields. In addition, there are 3 European Cups, one UEFA Super Cup, one European Cup Winners' Cup, one UEFA Cup, one Intercontinental Cup and one FIFA Club World Cup, which makes it, together with Liverpool, one of the most successful English clubs.

Together with Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester City, they are the only United Kingdom teams belonging to the group of only 31 clubs in the world that have won the top club football championship at world level, when on 30 November 1999 it won the Intercontinental Cup and on 21 December 2008 the Club World Cup, both played in Japan, defeating the Copa Libertadores representatives, Palmeiras and Liga de Quito respectively, by an identical score, 1-0. It is (among British clubs) the first and greatest winner of world club titles.

It is also considered one of the most popular sports clubs in the world; in 2012 it had a base of 659 million followers worldwide, mostly in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, Europe and the Americas. Since 1994 it has remained the club with the highest attendance at its league matches, with an average of more than 14 thousand fans per game. In financial terms, it is one of the sports teams with the highest market value in the world, being the first to exceed 3 billion USD in 2013.